WordPress Managed Hosting

A Beginner’s Guide

Learn what is WordPress Managed Hosting, and how it can help keep your website in the best shape so that you can do business smoothly and get more ROI.

Whether you need a business website, a blog, an ecommerce store, or an online portfolio, the easiest way to create them all is by using WordPress. WordPress is a widely used CMS platform for creating any type of website. It is free, easy to use, and doesn’t require programming.

WordPress Managed Hosting Guide

Anyone, with little or no technical knowledge, can set up a WordPress website with ease. But where they get stuck in what type of hosting solution to choose?

Mostly, the WordPress users look for a type of hosting that is reliable, low cost, easy to use for WordPress CMS, and has a maximum uptime.

In 2018, managed WordPress hosting providers improved their services by a great margin and due to these updates, the hosting services are now providing benefits which weren’t previously mentioned in great detail.

So, in this guide, we will focus on these unexplored features and look at WordPress managed hosting from a new perspective. Let’s get started!

What is WordPress Managed Hosting?

After WordPress became a prominent CMS platform in the last decade, hosting companies observed that majority of their users were using WordPress to host websites. But there were a few problems that these users faced during the management of their websites including, slow page speed, unguaranteed uptime, lack of SSL certificates, and numerous others that were making it difficult for them to manage their websites.

So, top hosting providers such as Cloudways started thinking of novel ways that would allow them to keep the customers while providing them a better solution to manage their businesses. So, they came up with a managed WordPress hosting solution.

With this solution, they were able to cater to the WordPress-based website in a much better way while solving the problems that they were facing with the previous hosts. These problems include high downtime, slow page speed, lack of support, to name a few.

WordPress Managed Hosting Guide – Cloudways

Types of Hosting

There are four basic types of website hosting solutions that a website uses. All of these have benefits and drawbacks. Read more details about them below in order to understand if they will suit your hosting requirements.

1. Shared Hosting

The first one is shared hosting. It consists of a single server on which multiple websites are hosted. All the resources of that server such as bandwidth, storage, and RAM, are shared with other websites of the server. The major drawback of a shared hosting is that when one website gets a lot of traffic (due to any reason) it can bring the whole server down.

2. Dedicated Hosting

The second one is dedicated hosting. It consists of a dedicated server that is assigned to you. Whether you want to host just a website, a network infrastructure of your company, or multiple apps, you have the liberty to do so. You buy the server resources including storage space, bandwidth, and RAM and the pricing is based on that.

It is not suitable for non-technical users because it requires a system admin to manage it. Also, it is a costly hosting solution for anyone who has few requirements because. Let’s suppose, you only have an e-commerce website. So, getting a dedicated hosting server for it will be a waste of resources. Also, a dedicated hosting solution takes time to scale. So, for websites that need to be scaled abruptly due to their requirements, a dedicated hosting solution won’t be a viable option for them.

3. VPS Hosting

Then, we have a VPS server. It is a mixture of shared and dedicated hosting. In this type, one server is further partitioned into multiple virtual hosting servers. You decide that how much storage space, bandwidth, and RAM you require on that virtual hosting server and it is allotted to you by the hosting company.

VPS works the same way as a dedicated server and you won’t see any difference in the two while using them. But some of the VPS servers offer auto-scaling, which makes it a better alternative for users who are looking for something between a shared hosting and a dedicated hosting solution.

The only problem is, a VPS server is usually built on a single server. This means if the server goes down, your VPS server and many others hosted on it will also become inaccessible.

4. Cloud Hosting

To fix the problems faced by all the other traditional hosting solutions, web hosting companies came up with the idea of cloud hosting. A cloud hosting solution differs from other hosting solutions because the data hosted on it is spread over multiple locations. Most cloud hosts have data centers in different parts of the world.

Cloud hosts spread the data of the user on multiple servers through virtualization. The cloud servers work in the same way as a virtual private servers with some additional perks. They have also the lowest downtime in all the hosting types explained above. This is because most of the data is available on virtual servers. Even if one server is down, the site data can be retrieved from some other source over the cloud.

A WordPress hosting service is available with two options: Managed and Unmanaged WordPress hosting services. Mostly, these hosting solutions are based on VPS or Cloud servers and come with additional support such as the installation of WordPress CMS, plugin installation, and CDN support.

Managed vs Unmanaged WordPress Hosting

Here’s the difference between managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting solutions, including benefits and drawbacks.

Managed WordPress Hosting

A managed hosting service provides many benefits to the users. For starters, it comes with a WordPress shell installed on the server. But some hosting companies provide plugins (optional service) to speed up the website and optimize them for SEO. Some managed WordPress hosting services also offer SSL certificate and CDN. The users of managed WordPress hosting services can also ask for a dedicated website manager through extended support for extra a couple of extra dollars.

Advantages of Managed WordPress Hosting

Here is a list of advantages that you can get with Managed WordPress Hosting.

Extended Support

A managed WordPress hosting service is for people who can’t or don’t know how to install a WordPress website. They can ask for extended support. In extended support, they get a dedicated engineer to solve their problems such as installing plugins, setting up the website from scratch and similar other tasks.

Security

Most WordPress websites are vulnerable to hackers because their owners don’t know how to secure the websites. With a managed hosting service, they can ask the hosting company to install relevant security software that can keep the hackers at bay.

SSL Certificate and CDN

Now Google has made SSL certificate an important part of the ranking algorithm. Those websites that aren’t using an SSL certificate at this time will probably see a drop in their rankings in near future if they don’t install SSL on their websites.

Similarly, they get free CDN with some WordPress managed hosting services like Cloudways.

Unmanaged WordPress Hosting

Unmanaged WordPress hosting only provides a basic hosting service with an installed operating system. Users need to install the CMS of their choice to get started with building their website. It is suitable for people who are skilled in handling their servers and WordPress websites.

Advantages of Unmanaged WordPress Hosting

Here is a list of advantages of using Unmanaged WordPress Hosting for your website.

Lower Costs

If you are tech-savvy and know how to install and setup server, then an unmanaged hosting will be an ideal choice for you. It will lower your costs and provide you with an affordable solution to get your business up and running faster.

More Freedom

With a barebone server, you can install almost anything on your WordPress website. Whether you want plugins, themes, or nothing at all, It is possible with an unmanaged hosting solution.

You can, in fact, roll back to a previous version of WordPress if you want with an unmanaged hosting service.

How Managed Hosting for WordPress Helps?

WordPress Managed Hosting offers a plethora of options to the online WordPress website owners. These include:

Impressive Performance

When you host a website on a server that’s especially built for that specific task then the speed of the website will automatically increase. That’s why WordPress websites on managed hostings have the highest performance ratio.

While searching for a WordPress managed hosting solution, make sure that the host provides you with latest technologies that scale performance such as PHP 7, Http 2 support, NGINX and other ones.

Consistent Support

Another reason to choose a WordPress managed hosting service is because of the superior support the managed hosting services offer. One instance is of Cloudways. They offer WordPress managed hosting with extended support. This allows their users to get all their WordPress-related issues resolved from the technical cloud engineers in minimum time.

Maximum Uptime

Every website claims that it offers 100 percent uptime, but in reality, most are either using VPS or Cloud host. Both these types of hosting services provide the maximum uptime for the websites. You can investigate the claims further by asking reviews of the service you choose on social media or asking one of their previous clients.

Consistent Backups

Disaster can happen anywhere. If you want to keep your data safe then look for managed hosting services that offer an automatic data backup facility to the users. The backups are performed by the solutions team and help you stay focused on what you do best, while they keep your data safely backed up.

Frequent Updates

The WordPress managed hosting service should automatically update your WordPress software so that you don’t face any hurdles. The updates are easy to install but in rare cases, they display a white screen of death. The dedicated WordPress hosting managers keep that from happening on your website while providing 100 percent uptime.

One-Click features

Make sure the hosting server offers one-click installation of numerous other features such as CDN, SSL certificates, and easy Git integration. All these help you optimize your website for a faster and sustainable performance

Real-Time Monitoring

One thing that most WordPress users want is to see an analysis of their website in a simple form. Cloudways WordPress managed hosting service offers that. It offers an integrated monitoring tab in the console that keeps a track of the server performance and scales it if needed.

Who Can Benefit from WordPress Managed Hosting?

Managed Hosting

I wouldn’t recommend the WordPress managed hosting service to everyone. But here are some types of users who can actually benefit from its features.

Bloggers

Bloggers need to keep their WordPress blogs up-to-date at all times. It isn’t possible for them to keep their sites updated while focusing on blogging and marketing, all at the same time. Therefore, a managed hosting solution would fit their needs best.

Dropshippers

Dropshippers need to set up ecommerce store where they can sell products. They need dropshipping plugins to achieve that. Handling all this is a complex process and requires great time and effort. While doing this, they can’t focus on updating the WordPress websites and boosting site speed. That’s why they can also benefit from WordPress Managed hosting solution

Ecommerce Stores

Similar to dropshippers, Ecommerce store owners have to handle products, logistics, marketing, and much more. They will need a dedicated person just to handle their WooCommerce back-end. Extended support of WordPress managed hosting will easily compliment them.

Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketers are trying to promote the products of others on their blogs. They need to come up with creative ideas to achieve that. They are always building content strategies, optimizing pages, monitoring analytics. They can’t simply update plugins and WordPress core. So, they are also ideal users of WordPress Managed hosting solutions.

Small Businesses

Non-tech small businesses also need to have an online presence. This way their customers can easily contact them using their websites. Even if they are not actively online, they still need to have a website where they can keep their contact information. As they will not be actively monitoring their website, they can’t update it when a new version rolls out. That’s why managed WordPress hosting solutions will complement their needs.

Which WordPress Hosting Solution is Best for You?

Managed Hosting

As you have read, there are multiple hosting solutions available to you such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting. If you are already familiar with how the servers work and would like to set up your own server, then simply buy an unmanaged hosting solution such as the ones we have discussed above.

But if you aren’t familiar and would like to take your website to next level without worrying about WordPress issues than a managed hosting solution from Cloudways will be an ideal solution for you.

Have something to add to this guide? Comment it below and add your thoughts to our piece.

Sajjad Shahid, Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways

Author Bio: Sajjad is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways – A Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. He loves helping out Ecommerce store owners, merchants and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups.